CBI's 2019 tally for bank fraud cases: 76 FIRs, almost `17,000 cr

New Delhi: The periodic nationwide drives that the Central Bureau of Investigation conducts to fight the menace of bank frauds have revealed data that shows no signs of the number of such cases coming down. And as the CBI just recently conducted its latest such drive, the number of bank fraud cases registered by the central agency this year so far has jumped to 76, amounting to a total bank fraud of around Rs 16,997.70 crore.

In comparison, the agency had registered 52 bank fraud cases in 2018 across the country, amounting to a total fraud of Rs 16,091 crore. And further back in 2017, the CBI had registered just 31 cases of bank fraud, with a total fraud amount of around Rs 11,352 crore.

Moreover, this data continues to show the vulnerability of public sector banks to such bank frauds, with the list of banks reporting such fraud consistently including Andhra Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Indian Overseas Bank, SBI, Allahabad Bank, Canara Bank, Dena Bank, Punjab & Sind Bank, Punjab National Bank, Central Bank of India, Union Bank of India, IDBI Bank, Bank of Baroda, Bank of Maharashtra and Bank of India, among others.

Another disturbing trend that has become evident with this data of CBI's bank fraud cases over the last three years is that a large amount of these frauds are perpetrated by an extremely small proportion of the offenders.

In fact, according data extracted by the Millennium Post, the CBI has registered 159 bank fraud cases since 2017, amounting to a total bank fraud of around Rs 44,447.70 crore. Of this, Rs 29,232.54 crore worth of bank fraud is attributed to just 15 offenders. These numbers show that around 65.77 percent of the bank fraud cases since 2017 were perpetrated by just 9.43 percent of offenders.

The big players among these, of course, includes the likes of the Sandesara brothers of the Sterling Biotech case, where the alleged fraud amount is of Rs 5,383 crore. Other common names in the bank fraud list include that of Jatin Mehta of Winsome Diamonds, against whom more than 10 FIRs have been registered. Winsome Diamonds has been booked for around Rs 6,500 crore of fraud just over the last three years.

But there are also some cases that do not show the entirety of the fraud allegedly committed. While the CBI's cases against Nirav Modi revealed a bank fraud of just around Rs 602.58 crore, the case opened up to reveal a fraud of more than Rs 13,000 crore. In other cases, like that of Bhushan Power and Steel, while the default amount is a staggering Rs 47,204 crore, the fraud amount so far detected comes to around Rs 2,348 crore only.

Since this data goes only as far back as 2017, Kingfisher and Vijay Mallya's fraud has not been included. But, Rotomac/Vikram Kothari's Rs 3,695 crore fraud, Axcel Sunshine/C Sivasankaran's Rs 1,339.76 crore fraud and the ICICI-Videocon fraud are three other of the 15 cases that amount to a majority of the bank frauds from the last three years.